The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. - Ayn Rand

Liberty is an inherently offensive lifestyle. Living in a free society guarantees that each one of us will see our most cherished principles and beliefs questioned and in some cases mocked. That psychic discomfort is the price we pay for basic civic peace. It's worth it. It's a pragmatic principle. Defend everyone else's rights, because if you don't there is no one to defend yours. --MaxedOutMama

The most glaring example of the cognitive dissonance on the left is the concept that human beings are inherently good, yet at the same time cannot be trusted with any kind of weapon, unless the magic fairy dust of government authority gets sprinkled upon them.--Moshe Ben-David

The cult of the left believes that it is engaged in a great apocalyptic battle with corporations and industrialists for the ownership of the unthinking masses. Its acolytes see themselves as the individuals who have been "liberated" to think for themselves. They make choices. You however are just a member of the unthinking masses. You are not really a person, but only respond to the agendas of your corporate overlords. If you eat too much, it's because corporations make you eat. If you kill, it's because corporations encourage you to buy guns. You are not an individual. You are a social problem. --Sultan Knish

All politics in this country now is just dress rehearsal for civil war. --Billy Beck

Saturday, May 14, 2011

This Blog R 8

Apparently so. Too bad I managed to lose the opening essay it took me an HOUR to compose. Oh well. I'll reconstruct it and put it back up later.

Welcome to The Smallest Minority, so named because most of the really good names, Eject! Eject! Eject!, USS Clueless, Instapundit, Acidman, and so on were already taken. And while not a Randian, I accept a lot of Ayn Rand's observations as accurate, and it was she who wrote: "The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities."

This blog is about the rights of individuals, that smallest of minorities, so it seemed apt.

More (hopefully MUCH more) to follow.

And much more has followed. According to Blogger I've published over 5,000 posts, an average of 1.7 per day. (Haven't kept that pace recently.) According to Sitemeter, the site has drawn over 2.2 million hits, an average well over 700 per day (and trust me, it didn't start out anywhere near that high).

I lost the 40,000+ comments collected by Echo (and before that, HaloScan) over the previous seven years when Echo decided that increasing their fees by a factor of ten was a smart business decision. Oh, I still have the comment archives, but I was never able to successfully import them to Disqus. Dammit. Surprisingly, the old comment threads are still working (like to the Überthread - it's 574 comments long, so give it a chance to load) but I don't have links to each and every comment thread for every post - nor do I know how much longer those links will be working. I'm still seriously bummed by that.

Eight years in the blogiverse is a long time, and I've enjoyed most of it, but as I noted in This I Believe, this blog has been an exploration of the core beliefs that guide my daily life. Some of those beliefs are unpleasant. But then, reality can be a stone-cold bitch. While I still believe that the courts will not save us, (further evidence given just recently) I will admit that I was far too pessimistic about what could beaccomplished via that path but not at all pessimistic enough about what can still be done to us via that same vector. I'm even more amazed at what we've been able to accomplish legislatively.

I do wish I was less pessimistic about our political "leaders." Hell, I wish I was less pessimistic about the electorate.

Still, on the whole I'm glad I chose to start this blog and stick with it. I hope in addition to giving me that place to explore my core beliefs and rant to my heart's content, it has also provided a service to those of you who visit, read and comment here on a regular basis. I do this to entertain me, but I probably wouldn't have done it nearly as long without that feedback.

So, thanks. Thanks for making all those hours worthwhile. Thanks for giving me things to think about and things to laugh about. I think I'll keep at it, at least for the next couple of years. The Mayan calendar notwithstanding, 2012 looks like it's going to be one helluva year.

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